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Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

Saving developer time, maximizing user confusion

2001 must have been a busy year in Redmond. Apparently, everyone at
Microsoft had a lot to do: New features, new products, you name it. In
fact, they had so much to do that the developers thought "how can we
save some time at implementing all the stuff we want to put into
Internet Explorer 6?" Introducing a strict rendering mode? Certainly a
good idea, but not much time to save there. Fixing old rendering bugs?
Nah, wasn’t part of the project map to begin with. But what about the
user options? Ah, we are getting closer.

Whenever you make software customizable, whenever you give the user a
choice, you have to come up with a way for the user to specify his
wishes. But as options change and expand, it can become quite a bit of
work to design good dialogs for user preferences. Isn’t there an easier
way to deal with that? Something, that leaves next to no work to the
developer? There certainly is, and Microsoft went down that path.
Microsoft proudly presents: "Turn a list of technical flags into
confusing options"&tm;

On the right we can see what they came up with. I stitched this one
together so that you can see all the options together. This one is from
the German version, though, but feel free to go your own IE to see it
for yourself in your language.

Let’s start with the general: The dialog has so many options, that
they don’t fit in the dialog. Well, maybe if we enlarge it? Naaat – its
not resizable. But Microsoft was kind enough to offer some handy
scrollbars. Though I hate the vertical scrollbar already (makes you be
afraid of what other hideous options lurk below), the horizontal
scrollbar is a clear indication of symptom fixing. Is it possible that
the options are simply too complicated if you need more space than
provided to display them?

Let’s make a note here: Lists of checkboxes do not belong into something
that needs horizontal scrolling. Nobody likes horizontal scrolling, and
for good reason, too. It destroys readability (unlike vertical
scrolling, you need to scroll twice per line instead of once per page
for vertical scrolling) and many input devices don’t support it well
either (there are only very few horizontal scroll wheels, for example).

Next: The options are grouped. Now, that’s generally a good idea,
because it gives the user some orientation on where to find what in this
long, long list. But our friends from Redmond screwed that one up, too:
The grouping is ambiguous, confusing and at times just wrong. Here are
some examples to think about:

Since when is “Check for updates” (the very first option!) related
to its group “Browsing”? The same goes for “Display Internet Explorer on
the Desktop” – that option shouldn’t even be there, as it should be a
property of the desktop in the first place – or not even that, as a
simple link would suffice.

Why do we have an option “Use optimized image flow” under “Browsing”
and another one “Use optimized flow of images” under “Multimedia” – is
there a difference?

Most options under “Multimedia” seem to affect the general browsing
experience of the user – maybe they should appear under “Browsing” then?
But I can just imagine the reason. Over there is the team for the
general rendering engine, and over here is the team for multimedia
stuff. Let everyone have his own set of options, let’s not talk to each
other. Certainly the user appreciates this transparent approach to
design.

Why is there a group “Searching in the address field” that contains
exactly one item: Another group called “While Searching”? Have there
once been options for searching that were used before or after
searching, but not while doing it? Here is a general rule in interface
design: If you have some hierarchy, there is no reason whatsoever to
have some static structure where one level is populated by exactly one
item! Every time that happens, some level can be eliminated without
loss.

Note beside: This also goes for the Start-Menu, where you often find
structures like “Start > Programs > Greatest, but largely unknown
software company of all times > One and only product from that company >
Start the damn thing.” Why not have it start from two levels further
above?

And there are a lot of other details in here that makes you wonder,
if they ever think about the user while working on their software:

The options differ greatly in technical depth. While some options
are of interest to the general user, others require far more technical
knowledge and will only be used by expert users. But Microsoft has
thrown them nicely mixed into one long list. My favourites: “Show
images” versus “Show short HTTP error messages”. Can you spot the one
for experts?

The “Show Go To button on the address bar” is a nice bad example for
“Don’t use single options if you could solve this much more generally”.
Most browsers nowadays support a very flexible configuration of all
buttons on all bars – not just that one button that Microsoft thought
might be undesirable. BTW: What does the Button add to, anyway?

Underline links: Could be a nice feature. Too bad, it doesn’t work.
If you have selected “Always” IE will underline links. Unless of course
the web designer has specified how to display links, which is the case
for most web sites nowadays. But then, it’s probably better that way,
anyhow.

Why does IE need a restart if I want to send my URLs as UTF-8? This
gives quite a bit of insight on the inner workings of this “fine”
product.

There is no consistent order or grouping: Why are the options for
displaying animations, images, sound and videos separated at all?

You know what? I could go on for hours rambling about that dialog.
There is next to no option that is well formulated and placed
accordingly. But instead I give you an example of how to improve
things:

This is just a quick hack in HTML, and it doesn't do anything about
the sheer number of options, but you can quickly see the much more
intuitive grouping and labeling of options.

How’s that, Redmond?

P.S.: This article refers to IE 6.0, which took its option dialog
from earlier versions. I was really surprised to see that even IE 7.0
still uses the same bad approach to options, so this article is still of
relevance. Has anyone tried IE 8.0 Beta yet?

1 comment:

Very entertaining! As I never had the affection to IE, I never used it
but for explaining things to my parents.IE was never intuitive and I
always dreamed of an option "Clean up GUI" such that I could add
function step by step.